Singapore and Katrina

There is something troublingly self-indulgent and slothful about America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed. It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down. ...snip...Singapore pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line....snip...Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed. The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. It is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

Friedman visits Singapore and sees America's future. And he thinks our President ought to get a big raise!

Keep a very close eye on Tom Friedman, everyone. He is an early articulator of what will become a critical frame:

Competent Government.

What Tom is saying in a very mendacious way is that the Conservative ideal of "small government" has finally, self-evidently, run its course, and it's time to find some grownups to run this big important country of ours.

There is so much wrong with this column that you just can't find a place to start. For just one thing, increasing the salaries of Administration executives and Supreme Court Justices is NOT going to give you better government. We elect our leaders, Tom. We don't hire them on the free market. And the metric by which we hire and fire CEOs is extraordinarily simple: the quarterly bottom line. There is no comparable metric for assessing the worth of Presidents, because so many important things are unmeasurable. What is the value of not having suffered a terrorist attack on our soil in four years? But people like Friedman won't even give our Administration credit for that.

Friedman is a very very smart guy. Like most smart guys, he thinks he has enough brainpower to solve the biggest problems in a down-the-line way. He's wrong, but he's dangerous because his error is seductive and infectious.

It's a vapid article full of left-wing projectionism as Freidman pretends that the childish faults of the Left (bike trails instead of levee work for the top spending priorities of pre-Katrina New Orleans comes to mind) are the faults of the Right.

Won't wash. He's all wet. Freidman is still attempting to get back into the Manhattan Cocktail Circuit's good graces (he endorsed the Iraq war and is pro-Israel). For **that** crowd of groupthink-adled lemmings, his above article will work. It's not as though reality means anything to them, anyway.

For the rest of the U.S., no one is going to think that President Clinton getting felated in the Oval Office will somehow put the "adults" back in charge again.

I gotta add one more thing to this.

Singapore is a city-state. Their model of well-paid, highly technocratic management (I won't say leadership) might just work here in a city of 4 million people. (Care to give it a try, Chicago?)

How about a city of 485,000? Can you just imagine how much better things would have gone if Ray Nagin's salary were $1.1 million a year?

The American model of limited government is absolutely correct at the Federal level, where leadership is far more important than day-to-day management. Let smaller localities experiment with more competent management. I guarantee you, if an American city were run like Singapore, people would start moving there or agitating for similar improvements in their own cities.

You've got that right, blackhedd. If there were a US city run like Singapore, it would be such a model of Conservative efficiency, and especially of law and order, that every Rat politician in the country would be denouncing it as oppressive and insensitive. I can hardly imagine two more diametrically opposite city governments than Singapore, where you can get arrested for littering or spitting on the sidewalk, and New Orleans, where it's pretty hard to get arrested for anything.

Arrgh I can't let this go. There is just too much here.

Tom fantasizes that raising civil servants to the pay grade of private CEOs ($1.1 million for a prime minister) is going to produce "incorruptible" administrators. Not unless we completely change the process by which we select our government leaders.

Managers in private industry get selected and sorted in a variety of ways, and the better organizations explicitly select for ethics and values in their leaders.

But we select our public leaders through a process that rewards some of the worst kinds of people: publicity-seeking self-glorifiers. These are the people that do well by simplifying important issues down to sound-bites and slogans, and whose most important qualification is looking and sounding good on television. That's how we got Bill Clinton.

And the reason for this is the ecosystem in which they live: it's all tied in with the media business. Our political leadership and our mainstream media are the same kind of celebrities, feeding off the same incentives, and each providing material for the other.

Raising the compensation level is NOT going to draw a better class of leader into the public arena, Tom. Those people still know enough to stay on the private side. I'm still shuddering at the thought of Ray Nagin with a one million dollar salary.

Listen dudes....I am currently in Singapore.

Tom Friedman is a joke.

What he fails to mention in his "puff piece" is that essentially Singapore is a one family show.

Friedman and his ilk like to go on and on about the "Busy Dynasty"...

well let's look at the Lee dynasty.

Lee Kwan Yew (aka Henry Lee) Prime Minister for decades, then Senior Minister, now Minister Mentor.

A politico barrister who manages to become one of the wealthiest men in Asia during his political career.

His son, the current prime minister, not elected mind you, just handed the job.

His daughter in law, the current pm's wife, the head of temasek holdings, the government investment company that owns almost every major Singaporean company.

His other son, the head of Singapore Airlines.

His other son, the head of Sing Power.

His other son, the head of Sing Tel.

Singapore's a great place, but not exactly a model of civil service reform, unless you happen to be a Lee.

That's why they pay their top civil servants so much......it's a family biz.

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our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured
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Two things come to mind :

1) Does agonizing over the value of a human life count as incompetence ? And does agonizing over the same mean that we necessarilly are ignoring health care ?

2) Here is thr question that the liberals never answer -- If you don't have health insurance in America, does that mean you NEVER, EVER have health care ? ( i.e., does a poor person with heart disease NEVER get treated for it without private health insurance ? ).

How does a person without private health insurance in the USA compare to the average Brit and Canadian wit their socialized medicine ?

Anyone did a comparative study on that ?

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we cut the National Science Foundation budget, while indulging absurd creationist theories in our schools and passing pork-laden energy and transportation bills in the middle of an energy crisis.
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1) I have relatives who live in Singapore. Their schools ALLOW Intelligent Design discussions ALONGSIDE Evolution.
I wonder what the heck Friedman is talking about....

2) I question the premise -- If you cut National Science Foundation budgets, that means that good science will thus, not be done in this country.

The premise of his statement is that WE NEED an NSF in order for science to flourish. HOW SO ?

3) Regarding "pork-laden energy and transportation bills", well well well, isn't this a BIG GOVERNMENT CONCEPT ? The problem we have really isn't that there is no money for public works or defense or homeland security. Our problem as Friedman points out is BUREAUCRATIC MISALLOCATION OF TAX DOLLARS. The $230 Million bridge to nowhere in Alaska is just one of them. And don't get started on saying there was not enough money to strengthen the New Orleans Levees. THERE WAS ! The problem was THEY WERE MISALLOCATED TO OTHER PORK LADEN PROJECTS.

If Friedman's suggestion is we need a Lee Kwan Yew to rule over Louisiana the way he did in Singapore.... I'd like to see how liberals react to that one.

You're right of course, even though the elder Lee has now reached the pinnacle of post-political prestige- he has his own Forbes column!

I don't want to overstretch this point but I think that Tom is really dreaming about a technocratic Federal government that stresses "competence" and ends up being more intrusive than Orwell's worst imaginings. He wouldn't mind a technocratic oligarchy like the family affair in Singapore.

Another example might be what they have in France, where the most promising young people go to the Ecole de Sciences Politiques and then become bureaucrats. It simply never occurs to France's best and brightest to go into private enterprise.

I think we see a lot of politicking for this kind of a future (Tom is in the vanguard). We need to corral the counterarguments now.

Hey watsonfellow

Im a couple hours drive north of you in KL - Thanks for pointing out the facts in your post. I agree with what you said concerning Friedman - the man is dangerous because being a visitor to the region he is still in the honeymoon stages of what he sees over here.

However Friedman is on to something - he's not sure what it is yet but he thinks he has the scent (he doesn't) - unfortunately when he finds out what it is it will be too late.

An American Expat in Southeast Asia

I don't know how things are in Singapore now days, but for decades it was basically a semi-police state. This article is a modern version of praising Mussolini's train schedule. And it might specifically interest Friedman to know that the reason given by authorities in Singapore for laying on this police state was to prevent a repeat of racial and ethnic violence like they experienced in the 60s.

One of the things Friedman neglected to add was that public corruption is punishED (not punishABLE) by hanging. It is assumed that if you are corroupt at those salaries, you are evil.

A gentleman I know is a computer specialist in the Singapore navy. He is very bright and in his early thirties. I asked him why he doesn't leave and get a better paying job on civvy street. His answer was iluminating. If he stays 20 years, he gets a $500,000 bonus and a good pension.

That seems like a lot, but it is $25,000 per year, much less than hiring and training costs. The US should pay attention.

Singapore os a truly remarkable country. Live there a while then tell me where is better and why.

I've been living here for 2 months and will be in Sinagpore in December and there are many reasons why I wouldn't choose to live here permanently. Here are just a few...

- Nepotism in government as was already pointed out
- No Freedom of speech
- No right to assemble peacefully
- No right to bear arms
- Threat of law suits if you criticize the ruling party (the PAP)
- No intellectual freedom in the schooling system
- Forced racial quotas for housing
- No right of religious leaders to speak on issues of politics
- Death penalty for non-violent crimes
- And lastly the weather can be quite poor at times as it rains every day, and eating food with chili for every meal can get become a little bit tiring.

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No intellectual freedom in the schooling system
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I have to add, as long as ideas are NOT DEEMED to cause social tension and create disharmony ( of course bureaucrats get to decide this ). Ironically, ideas that challenge the "fact" that Random Mutation + Natural Selection gives rise to human life CAN BE CHALLENGED. Hence Intelligent Design is actually allowed as part of class discussions. Friedman might want to consider this as he ridicules our education even as he praises Singapore's.

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